Who Are You? You Are What You Sell
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While by no means a complete list I’ve begun to select the products and services that I want to promote on my blog. Since my general topic is “make money online” the stuff I’m going to sell is tightly related to my topic.
It’s important that at least some of these selections are made before you begin (falls into the category of do as I say rather than do as I do 
) so you can build your blog’s structure around these money making items.
I’m not going into any details about the products at this point, I’m only sharing this list to give you an idea of the next step in the process of the $100 a day blogging project.
Search Engine Optimization
optiSpider
SEO BookMarket Research
Education
Perry Marshall - AdWords
E-books (eg: Day Job Killer)
Building Profitable WebsitesBusiness & Systems
Freedom Business Systems
Business Processes and ProceduresBooks
Four Hour Work Week
Cashflow Quadrant
E-MythMonetize Your Site
Text Link Ads
Adbrite
AdSenseTools
Real Blog Videos
Link Cloaker
aWeber
NemeasOutsourcing
What’s important about this list is not so much the products, but the categories that they fall into and the overall vision that has been defined.
Notice on my list the lack of “get rich quick” type crap like survey filling, or paid to surf stuff. I’m beginning to define my competitive advantage and my site’s unique offering compared to other sites in my niche.
Notice also the emphasis on sources of information about scalable and freedom-based (your business can run without you) business systems.
Those are my goals and I only want to promote products that align with my goals and my beliefs. It would be really bad business for me to start “selling” tools or products just because I can make a few bucks from them; they have to be a fit on a deeper level.
Products are the Profit Center Pages
The other important thing about this list is that the pages that I create to promote these (and and any others that I add to it) products will be the profit centers of this site.
The goal of all the rest of the pages on the site are to drive traffic to the profit pages, so we want to have them identified so that when we begin to design (re-design in my case) the structure of our site, that it is aligned with that goal.
If you’re following along, have you identified a list of profitable products that align with both your site’s theme and your personal visions and beliefs?
Not quite yet. I’m still mostly in the research stage, and I’m trying not to insert more ads until I have more than five visitors a day. AdSense is pretty safe because it’s contextual; I’m getting a bit sick of that I-Was-Scammed-37-Times ad though.
I also have a Friendfinder affiliate tile because I’ve made decent money as a Friendfinder affiliate in the past, although I’ve never tried being an affiliate referrer before.
I guess it’s all about experimenting while trying to stay relevant and reliable.
PS. It just occurred to me that I could filter that scam ad, because I went to the website and it looked dodgy. So I blocked it. Much better.
Good tip with the ad blocking. I agree completely the “I-Was-Scammed-37-Times” website does look dodgy and the product they are promoting looks 100% like a scam.
Traffic first, then monetize is a good formula, but if you can find solid products and write high quality reviews that convert buyers, you can [you're an expert right?] buy PPC traffic and have a profitable blog long before you have any serious organic traffic. More tips to come on this type of thing
If we don’t have such a list of products: does it mean that we chose the wrong subject, aren’t trying hard enough, both or something else?
@MD…not having a list of products could mean many things. The two major ones would be:
1.) you haven’t done enough market research
2.) your market sucks and doesn’t have any money in it.
In order to make money in a niche, somebody somewhere has to be selling SOMETHING. If there is stuff being sold in your market, but those products all suck or you think you can do better, then create your own products. But if you are blogging for profit you should have a pretty good idea of where that money is going to come from.
Of course there are exceptions. If you are going to blog about Paris Hilton, you can sell your eyeballs with CPM ads since it is a high volume subject.
In that case your traffic is your product and you can plan your site around the goal of maximizing page views and value per page view.
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